If Philadelphia and environs were a garden of poetry, it'd be ... quite a garden. It'd be huge. This is a poetry town that, while perhaps not as famed for verse as New York and San Francisco, is lush and fertile, especially during April, Poetry Month.

If Philadelphia and environs were a garden of poetry, it’d be … quite a garden.

It’d be huge. This is a poetry town that, while perhaps not as famed for verse as New York and San Francisco, is lush and fertile, especially during April, Poetry Month.

We have closed our poetry contest

To celebrate Poetry Month, we invited our readers to send in their work. John Timpane, Media Writer and a publishing poet, read and judged over 360 poems! You can find the winners and honorable mentions above. We hope to host this contest again next year. Stay tuned!

Our six poets represent six online literary magazines that have published them. (Several of them have appeared in more than one!) The diversity of styles – of both the poets and the magazines – speaks to the rich, many-tongued poetry world in Philadelphia. Lynn Levin has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Kelly McQuain in Press 1, Scott McVay in Wild River Review, Tamara Oakman in Apiary (of which she is a cofounder), Laura Spagnoli in ONandOnScreen, and Cleveland Wall in The New Purlieu Review.